Welcome And Fall Check-In

James Guttman 0:51

K Rock in LA to rooftops in Haiti, guys. It's James Guttman. It is Hi Pod I'm Dad. Thank you for finding me. Wherever you found me, it's October. September is done. You can enjoy your pumpkin spice. No one's going to give you a hard time for the next, I don't know, two months, right? Something like that. So yeah, enjoy it. Have fun. And thank you for finding me here. Whether you found me at any streaming service, we're everywhere. Hipodomdad.com. We have all the archives. And yeah, this has been it has been an interesting year. As you guys know, I've written a lot about uh my son growing

Parenting A Bigger Autistic Teen

James Guttman 1:25

up, right? I have two children. My daughter is 18. She's growing up. She's away at college. My son is 15. He grows stubble on his face. He is nearly my height. He outweighs me. Uh, but he's non-verbal with autism. And it's always been I don't want to say fear, but it's always been this thought in my head that one day my kid is going to be big. How are people going to react to my son when he's bigger? And that's been a topic that's been on my mind. So I've written a lot about it this year. The week before last, I wrote about not wanting to stop his joy, just kind of turning the volume down, making sure he realizes that I don't know, he's a big kid, right? I always think of the the old cartoon where the bear will grab a bunny or a chick or something and hug it so tight that he just crushes it. And I worry that that's my kid. So I've talked about it, I've written about it. But last week, thankfully, and this happens every once in a while, I got to write about something different. And I'm gonna tell you why I wrote about it, right? There are two reasons. So it's called There's Nothing to Be Sorry About. And the thing that kind of made me write this article is that I was talking to somebody

When Someone Says “I’m Sorry”

James Guttman 2:32

and I told them about my son. My, you know, Lucas is 15, he's nonverbal, he has autism, and the person said back to me, Oh, I'm sorry. And it had been so long since someone had said something like that regarding my son. And I gotta be honest, I don't know if it's generational or whatever, this person was older than me. I find that people younger than me and people around my age kind of get it. Autism awareness is out there, but there are definitely people who still don't fully understand or accept it or really get where it's from. But I was proud of myself because I wasn't offended, right? Um, I tried to educate, I mean, I didn't love it. This isn't my best friend now, but I I got it. And I said, Well, it's nothing to be sorry about. You know, my son is this, we have communication, he's my best friend, all this stuff. And people like it and they hear it and they go with it. But to me, that shows that there's still work to be done in terms of awareness. And what's funny is so I wrote the article, I put it up, the post, and the post was called There's nothing to be sorry about. Thought that it got out there. And maybe, I don't know, man, maybe it's the universe, maybe it's in the air, maybe there's something in the back of my mind. But what's funny was about a day or two after I posted it, I'm on Facebook and I get a Facebook memory from an old story that I could share. And I'm thinking, huh, what is this? And I look back and it was a freelance piece that I had written about Lucas, right? So I've done freelance work my whole career, right? I've worked for uh Autism Speaks, printed some of my stuff, and The Mighty, and it was on Yahoo and and you know, uh Huffpo and all these different things where I'm not a staff writer, but I will send them work and they'll publish it and I'm proud of it. And

The “Scary” Email And Stigma

James Guttman 4:10

even outside of writing about Lucas, I've done freelance work forever, print and digital. I work for post media. I was doing stories about charities in Canada and I was putting the newspapers and things like that. So it's I have dealt with so many different people from so many different avenues that I forget half the time the stuff that I've written. And I forgot about this article that I had done freelance work for, which I guess at this point now is like four, five, six years ago, whatever it was. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh my God, I remember this. And it fits into what I wrote about this week. And I'll tell you, so here's what happened. Um, I was doing a freelance piece, and it was for a parenting website, pretty much neurotypical parenting. But here I am, and I've always tried to do this, especially early on. I've kind of shied away from it a little bit where you go to these parenting sites and you go, hey, I have a different spin. You know, my son is nonverbal. This is what I went through, this is how I, you know, dealt with things. And I forget what the story was. I swear to God, I forget what I wrote about, but it was something about like people not understanding him or not understanding what it's like to parent him. It was, you know, a classic kind of my son is fantastic, and some people don't get it peace, right? And the woman who was the editor or whatever the job was that she had, she wrote back to me after I wrote it, and she was like, Oh, thanks for sending this over. This is scary. And I sat with that for a little bit and I stared at it. Because I didn't get it. Scary. What the hell's scary about it? Like all I knew is that it just kind of hit a nerve somewhere. And I thought to myself, all right, keep your mouth shut. This is like a couple of hundred dollars, I'll pay you to write articles. But I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to keep my mouth shut. I didn't want to write more stuff for these people. I wanted to know what she meant. So I said, What do you mean by scary? That's pretty much what I broke back. I was like, what do you mean by and she came back and it was something like roundabout, it's very scary that people don't understand autism and like some convoluted thing. But I knew what she meant. And if you're listening to this and you have a child similar to my son, you know what she meant because you've heard it before. We've gotten that from people before. This automatic assumption that your child with any sort of challenges, any sort of special needs, is something to be sorry for, or something being presented as some sort of like foreboding tale. You know, I'm out there warning people about the autism and oh, look how scary. And you feel it and you get it. And again, like I and this blog that I wrote on Monday, and it's funny because I didn't even know about you know this article coming up as a memory. I'd forgotten about this article altogether. Um but what's funny to me is that with these people who talk about sorry and scary, I can be pretty blunt with you, and I'm gonna be pretty blunt with you. When my son was little and he was first getting diagnosed, it was scary. And it was something that I felt sorry for myself about. Yeah. I think everybody does. When you don't know what's happening, when you think that you might have brought your child into the world and handed them challenges, those are all difficult things. But through the years, as my son has grown up and I've learned his personality, and don't get me wrong, man, my kid is he has severe autism, he has profound autism. There are things that I have to do every single day that I don't talk about on here in terms of taking care of my son and making sure that he's happy

From Early Fear To Pride

James Guttman 7:40

and taking care of, uh, that I don't bring up, that people would be like, oh my God, you have to do all these things. I do. So it's not easy and it's not simple, and it's not the kind of thing where, like, oh, it ended up not being that hard. It is pretty hard. But my son is amazing. He's a wonderful kid, he's sweet. Uh, on the days where he's coming back to me, I have I've split custody, comes back, I look forward to it all day. I get so excited, I see him, I hug him, I squeeze him, we hang out, I try to find things to do with him, even though he doesn't care. I've written about that too, taking him on adventures that he doesn't care about just simply because he deserves it. He's Lucas, he deserves everything, right? Um, so as he's grown up and as his personality has developed, I've seen a lot of these other kids that at Lucas' age were doing these things that used to be so hard to see. And again, you see it in parents who have younger children, where, and I wrote a blog about this many years ago, how it would hurt sometimes to see a neurotypical kid doing the things that my son should be doing, right? At five, six, seven. The classic example I always gave was that like when he was three, four, five, I kept thinking to myself, well, some kids are still struggling to talk, it's not a big deal. And then, like, a five-year-old will come over and tell me a knock-knock joke, and I'll be like, Are you freaking kidding me? That's what they're doing now. They're telling knock like this is the age for knock-knock jokes. Because it throws off your perception of what what the milestones are when your kid stops meeting them. But I got news for you that knock-knock joke kid is now 15 years old, and my son is 15 years old, and my son has his own challenges. And this five-year-old, who at five, just like all the other neurotypical kids, seem to be perfect because all you're judging them on is do they talk, do they walk, do they understand their ABCs? That to you is like that kid is perfect. But guess what? At 15, it's about more than how many words you say and what you do. So everybody ends up finding issues here and there. And there are kids who, you know, I was jealous of for my son at five, who now at 15, I'm like, I am glad that my son is not, you know, smoking crack in the corner or whatever, whatever possible thing, lying, cheating, getting girls pregnant, all these things that Lucas could be doing that's terrible. He's not doing them. Are there difficulties? Are there things? Do I necessarily consider him better or worth it any? No, he's his own person. But I'm saying is there's nothing, especially now, any more to be sorry about as it relates to my kid. In fact, I'm sorry for you because you don't know him. That's the sorry that I have. Because if you knew my son and you knew the life that he lived, if you knew the love that he gave, and if you knew how he treated others, you would know that there's nothing to be sorry about. You would know how lucky I am as a father to raise this boy and show him the world. And I couldn't be any luckier and I couldn't be any happier. And it's important to me to share that, to put that out there, and to tell you guys if you have a kid who is showing these signs of delay and you're kicking yourself over it, I get it. But you'll learn soon enough. Your kid is your kid. You raise them to be the person you want. And with Lucas, I've raised him as best I could to be the best possible version of himself. And the kid that he is, he might not do everything, but I know that everything he's capable of doing, he's doing. Because I know that no one tries harder. Um, and no one is a you know harder worker than my son. Kid blows me away. I love him. So if you're sorry for me, I'm sorry for

Gratitude And Where To Follow

James Guttman 11:15

you. And it is what it is, and that does it for me. Guys, do me a favor, come back on Monday, hiblogomdad.com. We got new blogs every single week. Hipodom dad. We have this podcast every single Friday. And if you follow me at Hi James Gutman, H I Hi James Gutman, uh, I'm on uh Instagram and TikTok and on Facebook. You can find us at Hiblogom Dad. I have that as well. Yeah, we'll talk, we'll converse, we'll tell more stories, and I'll see you next week. Until then, James Gutman's hand be well. Bye bye.